One of the small things I like to add to a setting – modern or later, that is – are companies and brands. This is probably caused by my teenage fascination with Cyberpunk, in which this was a heavily-used “trope”. Just consider the advertisement screens in Bladerunner’s city scenes, Ono-Sendai in Neuromancer, Omni Consumer Products in Robocop, or the Zik Zak Corporation and Network XXIII, not to mention Cyberpunk 2020 and ICE’s Cyberspace games.

But brands also have a firm place in more mainstream science fiction. 2001’s famous Pan Am orbital shuttle, Weyland-Yutani from the Aliens franchise, U.S. Robots. Companies feature heavily in Piper’s works, Heinlein name-drops companies in many books, and even Larry Niven has his General Products corporation (and the less famous and rarely-mentioned Nakamura Lines).

This is what I got so far:

Blackforge Heavy Industries

Bright Sun Corporation

Continuum Cola

Corban Motor Company

First Interstellar Bank

HexBolt Manufactury

Imperial Robotics

Imperial Skylines

Omni Spacecraft Corporation

Pan Colonial

Pan Imperial

Redsands

Star Drive Corporation

Star Com

Thunder, Inc

Designing these, their logos, backgrounds and products is a fun thing to do, and a perfect example of just how interdisciplinary world building truly is.

The BBC posted an article about modern designs of research stations in the antarctic. There are some really, really gorgeous designs and these are of course much more practical than ye olde wooden shed.

This was posted on Reddit a while ago; someone created graphics showing what Earth sunsets may look like if our Sun were replaced with another star. I do not know how accurate these images are, but they are surely beautiful:

Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet, in the system, J1407b, which is 200 times the size of the ring system of Saturn. There are also gaps in the rings which they think indicate the presence of moons there. The Contact Light setting has got to have at least one gigantic ring system like this!

Ancient Star System

In other news, Kepler has found an ancient planetary system. The system, Kepler-444, is 11.2 billion years old. It has at least five planets – all of them too hot to support life – but it means ancient systems can exist amidst much younger stars. Planets on which civilizations rose and fell long before life even got started elsewhere.